Lost and disoriented. So much so that I could not come back to the intro chapter which is already almost perfectly outlined. So, today I decided to take up the translation I discontinued months ago. I ended up spending 8 hours to translate a couple of chapters from Alexander Berkman's Prison Memoirs. Never had I felt so channeled to Berkman's physical and spiritual predicament in the prison. Yet, the more connected I felt to Berkman, the more unreal and uncanny my life became, the more confused and deranged my existence. I was transposed to the dungeon in Pennsylvania in 1896, while writing in Japanese which I didn't use for weeks, even for months. In translating Berkman's strangely fluent English and listening to Schubert's string quartets played by Juilliard Quartet, I simply wondered why I was in California today. It just didn't make sense. Disconnected, disjunctured, disjointed. My sense of place and time is still in anarchic confusion. But I also wonder whether I could feel at home when I would be back in Japan. I'm afraid that this sense of dislocation has become part of me.
